It’s a giant blow to China. And it will be a stunning blow to the confidence of investors, many of which have been hoping to profit handsomely from the avalanche of infrastructure deals happening across the planet.

BAD GAMBLES

The high-speed railway is far from an isolated example. Around the world, many massive infrastructure projects are collapsing.

In some instances, billions of dollars are being lost both by the investors and host nations.

In other cases, mega-projects that had initially appeared to be a great idea have turned out to be economic, environmental, and social calamities.

NATURAL GAS NIGHTMARE

In the Pacific-island nation of Papua New Guinea, a $19 billion liquid-natural-gas project, known as PNG-LNG, was widely heralded as an economic savior for the nation.

But now it is increasingly regarded as an economic loser.

Two recent reports have branded PNG-LNG a “development failure” — for delivering just a fraction of promised jobs, household incomes, national economic growth, and government revenues.

Source: Jubilee Australia Research Centre (2018)

As summarized on the leading website Mongabay, aggressive tax avoidance by ExxonMobil and other foreign investors are effectively defrauding the government of Papua New Guinea of hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

There are, of course, many illegal threats — such as land invasions, mining, logging, and poaching happening inside protected areas.

But just as scary is a wide range of legal or quasi-legal dangers.

In Brazil, for instance, conservative President Michel Temer has tried to use legal tactics to open up the vast RENCA Reserve Network in eastern Amazonia for industrial mining — a plan that was only halted at the very last moment by a judge’s decree.

The Temer government also seems determined to shrink four other Amazonian parks and completely abolish a fifth reserve to open up new lands for miners.

Global Debate

Once considered almost inalienable, protected areas today are facing an array of legal threats collectively known as PADDD — “Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement.”

Downgrading occurs when a government weakens the legal status of a protected area, generally to allow activities such as mining, logging, or wildlife harvesting.

Global Problem

PADDD is becoming a global crisis.

Even World Heritage Sites — supposedly the pinnacle of Earth's protected areas — are feeling the bite. For example, the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania, a famous World Heritage Area, was shrunk in 2012 to allow a massive uranium mine.

In 2011, Cambodia carved out a section of its largest national park — Virachey — to build a vast rubber plantation. At the time, a government official defended the decision with an Orwellian statement: “It is not against the law when the government approves it.”

And it's not just developing nations that are pushing PADDD.

In the U.S., the Trump Administration slashed 85 percent of Bears Ears Monument in Utah — an area of great cultural, geological, and environmental importance.

And last year, Australia’s federal government proposed what WWF called “the largest protected area downgrading in the world” when it announced that it wanted to allow commercial fishing in nearly half a million square kilometers of marine parks.

Beware of Conservative Governments

PADDD events can happen under any government, but appear more likely under conservative ones.

They also appear to be increasing. In our age of ever-expanding human populations and the ceaseless drive for resources, this is hardly surprising.

But in the face of climate change, mass extinction, and habitat degradation, protected areas are more essential than at any time before. They are one of our most vital tools to stop ecological meltdown.

The best way to fight PADDD is through public activism. Protests, marches, and international criticism have saved protected areas from New Zealand to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

We all want to believe our protected areas are actually being protected. But they are being attacked, dissected, and eroded every day.

The lesson for us is simple: Conservation won’t succeed without protected areas, and protected areas won’t survive without our constant vigilance.

Jeremy Hance is a leading environmental journalist and frequent contributor to ALERT.

Sometimes conservation controversies explode so fast in one place that it becomes almost white-hot.

That’s what’s happening right now in the Amazon—with a cyclonic mix of good and bad news.

We summarize here some of the key highlights.

GOOD NEWS

BIG NEW PARK

First, Peru has just declared an expansive new national park in the Amazon. Yaguas National Park encompasses the biologically richest ecosystems on the planet, and will span about 870,000 hectares (nearly 2.2 million acres) along the Putumayo River in northeastern Peru.

The new park sustains two-thirds of Peru’s freshwater fish species as well as thousands of plants, birds, and other fauna.

ALERT’s John Terborgh, who has conducted research in Peru for over a half-century, heralds the good news but says, “Declaring a park is only the first step. The proof of the pudding will be in its implementation [by the government].”

Fingers crossed for this vital new park.

MEGA-DAMS

Second, in what could become an earth-shaking precedent, Brazil has just backed away from its intensely controversial policy of building giant hydropower dams in the Amazon Basin.

Such dams not only flood large areas of forest—seriously harming biodiversity, generating major greenhouse-gas emissions, and displacing local peoples—but also require networks of new roads for dam construction and maintenance.

The government of Brazilian President Michel Temer—facing possible impeachment for corruption allegations and barely clinging to political power—has traditionally favored the planned mega-dams. Why the sudden change in policy?

ALERT’s Philip Fearnside, a top Amazon expert, suggests the move has been prompted both by resistance from environmental and indigenous groups, and by the ongoing corruption allegations—particularly those involving hefty government contracts awarded to corporations for dam construction. Brazil’s suffering economy hasn’t helped either.

Whatever the reason, the Temer government has correctly decided—at least for now—to halt one of the most environmentally dangerous and financially risky policies in the Amazon.

BAD NEWS

ROAD-BUILDING FRENZY

In terms of ‘bad news’, one need look only at the incredible spate of ongoing, planned, and proposed road projects in Amazonia. If constructed in their entirety, these projects would massively fragment and degrade the world’s largest rainforest.

For example, there is the massive Manaus-Porto Velho Highway (BR-319), which could help to chop the Amazon in half (see this recent ALERT video).

Beyond this, Peru is funding an avalanche of new roads near its border with Brazil. A recent study suggests these roads, if completed, would lead to the loss of over 270,000 hectares of forest (680,000 acres).

This proposal is not yet funded, but if it proceeds it would be incredibly dangerous environmentally and socially. Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, is formally supporting it, although his own Ministry of Transport does not.

Keep your eyes on the Iquitos-Saramiriza highway—a potential disaster for the Peruvian Amazon.

THE CLOSER ONE LOOKS...

And a final alarm bell: scientists have just learned that deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon are much higher than was previously thought.

The European Community’s new Sentinel satellites—which have much better spatial resolution than the U.S. Landsat satellites used for the past several decades—are finding much more destroyed or damaged forests on the ground.

With a more accurate picture, it turns out that the Amazon is in considerably worse shape than we thought before. Many forests that were formerly assumed to be intact are actually logged or fragmented.

This is important because degraded forests are particularly vulnerable to fire—as evidenced by large areas of damaged forest that are currently aflame in the Amazon.

ALERT researchers released today a one-minute video that shows how a massive development scheme in Brazil could effectively chop the Amazon — the world's greatest rainforest — in half.

Brazil is currently working to complete a dramatic upgrade to the BR-319 Highway, an 870 kilometer-long road segment running between the city of Manaus in central Amazonia to Porto Velho in southern Amazonia.

Once completed, this road will link directly to the BR-174 Highway, which runs from Manaus to the northern border of Brazil.

Together, the two paved highways will slice the Amazon in half along a north-south axis.

Brazil has already completed a giant bridge, spanning 3.6 kilometers in length, that traverses the Rio Negro ("Black River") near Manaus. The bridge will help to connect the two highways together.

In the past, paved highways in the Amazon have frequently opened a Pandora's box of human impacts, including large-scale deforestation, fires, illegal logging, wildlife poaching, illicit gold mining, and land speculation.

For example, the BR-163, another paved highway that slices across the southern Amazon, resulted in a massive line of human-lit forest fires that would have been visible from the moon.

The Amazon video was written and produced by ALERT director Bill Laurance, with the videography done by Laurie Hedges. Laurance has been studying the impacts of forest fragmentation and road development on Amazonian ecosystems since 1996.

ALERT member Philip Fearnside, another leading Amazon expert, has been warning about the severe environmental impacts of upgrading the BR-319 into a major highway for more than a decade.

Amazonian rainforests are probably the biologically richest ecosystems on Earth.

As humans fragment forests they create large amounts of abrupt, artificial forest edge. In the tropics, for example, there is now an incredible 50 million kilometers of forest edge -- enough to stretch one-third of the way between the Earth and the Sun.

According to two recent studies, such fragmentation causes tropical forests to lose a large amount of their carbon. That lost carbon goes into the atmosphere, increasing the risks of harmful climate change.

Carbon collapse near forest edges

The first study, based on analyses of satellite imagery by Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer and colleagues, suggests that fragmented tropical forests are losing a remarkable 25 percent of their biomass (and hence their carbon) within the first 500 meters of their forest edges.

Oil palm plantations fragment a forest in Borneo

Why is this carbon collapse happening? Lots of trees are dying near forest edges, especially the towering canopy trees -- which contain much of the carbon stored in forests.

The intense vulnerability of large tropical trees was first revealed by a team led by ALERT's Bill and Susan Laurance and Thomas Lovejoy. This research suggested that microclimatic stresses and heavy wind turbulence near forest edges were the major tree killers.

Ecological Ripple-Effects

The second study, by Carolina Bello and colleagues, is just as ecologically intriguing. It's well known that big animals such as primates, large fruit-eating birds, elephants, and other seed-dispersing animals disappear in forests that have been fragmented or heavily hunted.

These animals often find the limited universe of a forest fragment too small for survival, or vanish when killed off by poachers armed with rifles and snares.

Spider monkeys are essential seed dispersers

Many of these vulnerable animals are vital dispersers for large-seeded trees. Without the animals, the big seeds just accumulate at the base of their parent trees, where they are killed by natural enemies such as seed beetles or fungi.

And large-seeded trees have big seeds for a good reason: when the seeds germinate, their seedlings need enough nutrients to survive for a long time -- sometimes waiting many years for a treefall gap to occur, at which point the seedling has enough light to start growing into a tall tree.

Big Trees Contain Lots of Carbon

In terms of their carbon storage, big-seeded trees have two key features. First, because they grow slowly they tend to have dense wood -- which stores a lot of carbon.

Second, these big-seeded species often grow into massive canopy or emergent trees.

The president has also supported a controversial highway project demanded by conservative politicians — known as “ruralists” — and backed measures to reduce Amazonian protected areas (see here, here, and here).

Pork-Barrel Payouts

These measures are in addition to Temer handing out over $1.3 billion in pork-barrel appropriations to selected federal deputies — with estimates of future handouts as high as $5.2 billion, not including other other expensive concessions to Temer’s political allies.

The “ruralists” are benefiting hugely from Temer’s generosity with public monies, and are now so powerful that they are blocking impeachment proceedings against him (see here, here, here, and here).

This is Brazil today. A president with dark corruption allegations hanging over his head is willfully sacrificing the country’s incredible environment to save his own political skin — while handing out massive payouts to his "ruralist" allies in congress.

Mining, logging, agribusiness, and wildlife poaching are the four biggest killers of conservationists, according to the advocacy group Global Witness.

In total, those four activities accounted for nearly 100 deaths of nature defenders, most of whom were murdered.

DEADLY AMAZON

Overall, the Amazon is the most dangerous place to be a conservationist, with at least 49 deaths in 2016. Most of these are attributed to murders by loggers and landowners.

Memorably, it was the murder in 2005 of a Catholic nun, Dorothy Stang, that so enraged Brazilians that President Lula was forced to send the Army into the Amazon.

Stang had been helping local and indigenous peoples in the Amazon to stand up to illegal land theft by wealthy cattle ranchers and land speculators.

One of those ranchers hired two hit-men to track down and murder Stang. They shot her six times.

In many peoples’ eyes, it was the death of Stang that final signaled ‘enough’ to Brazilians.

Her death revealed the growing human cost of illegal logging, land theft, and other illicit activities in the Amazon, which at that point were running rampant. It wasn’t just nature that was suffering, but lots of people too.

MORE ATTACKS

The attacks on nature are taking other forms as well.

In Brazil, the government of president Michel Temer is rapidly becoming notorious for its assaults on nature conservation.

As detailed in previous ALERT blogs (see herehere, here, and here), Brazil’s environment has been reeling from political attacks instigated by Temer and conservative members of the Brazilian congress.

Among other activities, the conservatives are striving to reduce the size of Amazonian protected areas while favoring illegal land-grabs and weakening a range of environmental laws.

And the risks to conservation aren’t limited to developing nations.

ASSAULTS DOWN UNDER

In Australia, ominous signs are emerging that environmental groups might lose their tax-free status — at least if the present conservative government has its way.

Nature-conservation groups, which operate on notoriously thin budgets, are cringing at the thought.

Much of the pressure is being brought to bear by Australia’s powerful mining industry, and the politicians it supports.

Mining corporations in Australia routinely spend tens of millions of dollars each year on political lobbying.

Using a giant media blitz, these powerful corporations even managed, in effect, to overthrow a former Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, in 2010.

Rudd had proposed to bring in a tax on mining “super-profits” — both to help balance the Australian economy and fund initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Today, the big miners want to hamstring their pro-environmental opponents by attacking their meager funding base.

KEEP FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT

And so it goes.

Being a conservationist in the modern world is not easy, nor is it lucrative.

And because of its many powerful and wealthy opponents, it seems to be getting rougher and even more physically dangerous every year.

But there’s no time to get discouraged. Despite being beleaguered and underfunded, conservationists are still winning lots of battles (for example, see here, here, and here).

Without environmental laws we'd all be breathing polluted air, drinking foul water, and living in a perpetual silent spring -- where nature and wildlife had long ago vanished.

Yet those very same laws that keep our world livable are under assault. Nearly everywhere one looks, environmental regulations and their enforcement are being rolled back, eroded, or just plain ignored.

A recent analysis by Guillaume Chapron and colleagues reveals the growing tide of assaults on environmental laws worldwide and the staggering diversity of tactics being employed. If nothing else, it illustrates the creativity of those who seek short-term profits at the expense of nature.

(c) Nick Kim

Taxonomy of Tactics

The array of assaults on environmental protections is so diverse that Chapron and colleagues ended up devising a "taxonomy" simply to categorize them all. And in an effort to stay abreast of all the nefariousness, they have set up a public database to list the attempts.

Here is a quick snapshot of skulduggery -- a laundry list of ongoing efforts to undercut environmental legislation at the expense of the Earth:

Endangered Species?

Species staring at the abyss of extinction are protected, right? Nope, at least not in the western U.S. states of Idaho and Montana. There, gray wolves -- an endangered species -- can be gunned down if they dare to stray outside of official wilderness areas.

And in Western Australia, an endangered species can actually be driven to extinction if the Environment Minister orders it and Parliament approves it.

Bolster Biodiversity?

Biodiversity is important, right? Not in Canada. There, native fish species that don't have economic or recreational value don't get any legal protection from serious harm.

And in France, shooting migratory birds is illegal. But migrating birds get shot out of the sky anyway because the environment minister has ordered that the law not be enforced.

(c) Nick Kim

Dilute Protections

In South Africa, the environment minister formerly had authority to limit environmental damage and oversee ecological restoration on mining sites. Not any more. That power has been handed over to the mining minister -- who, not surprisingly, is a lot less finicky about environmental stuff.

And in Brazil, the famous Forest Code that has helped to reduce deforestation rates has been seriously watered down. Safeguards for forests along waterways and on hillsides have been weakened, and landowners that illegally fell forests no longer have to replant them.

Forget Climate Change

Worried about climate change? Not in the U.S. Proposed legislation there (U.S. S3071) would prohibit the government from considering climate change as a threat to any species.

Shoot the Messengers

And in many parts of the world, those who dare to criticize sinning corporations are getting hit with SLAPP suits -- strategic lawsuits against public participation. In Peru, for instance, a corporation that was mowing down rainforest to grow 'sustainable' cacao for making chocolate used lawsuits and heavy legal threats to intimidate anyone who dared to decry it.

Take-Home Message

You can't make some of this stuff up -- and the examples above are only scratching the surface.

Around the world, the laws and regulations that have been established to protect nature are being conveniently downsized, diminished, swept under the carpet, and ignored.

But don't get depressed -- get mad. Make some noise. Yell at your legislators. Organize a boycott.

It does make a difference. Those who are weakening environmental protections can only get away with it if we let them. They'll usually back down -- if we bellow loud enough.

Treatment Options

But if we do get cancer, then what? Well, there are two options.

The easiest is surgery—cut the cancer out, if it’s caught early enough. This would be analogous to closing a forest road completely.

For instance, after a logging operation, one could destroy a key bridge at the entrance to the forest, or set up a permanently-manned guard post to ensure illegal encroachers and poachers are kept away.

The second option is more expensive and painful. If we can’t cut the cancer out, then the options are long-term treatment—radiation and chemotherapy.

It's painful and expensive, but it's better than nothing.

The analogy in this case would be for the government to maintain the road through the forest but to attempt to control human activities along the road. For instance, there could be land-use and forestry regulations, land-use planning, and legal enforcement.

The problem is that this requires a long-term, recurring investment—it’s expensive and difficult.

It assumes the government has the resources for monitoring activities along the road, has adequate law-enforcement capabilities, and has an effective judiciary to enforce the law.

Unfortunately, this kind of treatment often doesn’t work, especially in many frontier areas where the rule of law is limited. Bribery and corruption occur, along with waves of illegal mining, logging, poaching, and land speculation.

It teaches us a vital lesson: It’s crucial to stop roads from penetrating into any landscape or ecosystem that we seriously want to conserve—unless we have a very effective means in place for controlling the cancer of deforestation.

ALERT members Philip Fearnside and Thomas Lovejoy -- two of the world's most eminent authorities on tropical environments and development -- are intensely worried about recent political attacks on protected areas in the Amazon:

Avoiding Amazon Dieback

If conservative legislators in Brazil get their way, nature reserves in the Amazon could be slashed by around 1.5 million hectares -- an area bigger than the Bahamas.

From a nature-conservation perspective, this would be a foolish and dangerous step backwards.

By promoting further forest loss, the attack on nature reserves might even destabilize the Amazon's climate, which relies on moisture that the rainforest effectively produces itself.

Further forest disruption could even tip the balance toward Amazon dieback -- a catastrophic scenario in which more deforestation worsens dry-season droughts and wildfires, leading to ever more deforestation.

Political Maneuvers

Political dangers are popping up all over the Brazilian Amazon.

For example, Brazil’s vast state of Amazonas -- twice the size of Texas -- has so far prided itself in being one of the most intact areas of the Amazon.

But the cancer of deforestation is set to grow rapidly in southern Amazonas, where forests are already highly vulnerable.

In March, Congressional members from Amazonas -- with the backing of Brazilian President Temer -- moved to revoke or drastically downgrade protected areas in southern Amazonas (see here, here, here, and here).

Trouble is also brewing in nearby Pará, another massive Amazon state. On March 12, it only took 7 minutes for one of Brazil's Congressional Chambers to mutilate 510,000 hectares of reserves in Pará, transforming them into public lands or a loose land categorization (APAs) that has almost no real protection, and can be sold as private property.

Growing Attacks

In Brazil, as in many other developing nations, attacks on protected areas are proceeding apace. Parks are being carved apart, weakened legally, or entirely cancelled to allow access for mining, oil and gas developments, dam construction, and to slice up the parks with new road projects.

This phenomenon has an acronym: PADDD, or Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement. And there's even a cool website where you can see thousands of PADDD events happening right now, in any part of the world.

The Amazon's protected-area network plays a vital role in limiting the vulnerability of the region's forests to aggressive land-use exploitation.

The Amazon has regional and even global impacts on our climate, and is a storehouse for incredible biodiversity.

It's time for the world to stand up for the Amazon -- to show parochial political groups in Brazil that far too much will be lost if the wheels of progress crush nature beneath them.

ALERT member Philip Fearnside, arguably the world's leading expert on Amazon conservation and development, gives us an update on alarming developments in Brazil.

The power of Brazil’s “ruralist” block, which represents agribusiness in the country’s National Congress, has reached new heights with the recent surge of proposed laws and constitutional amendments aimed at gutting the environmental licensing system.

A bonanza of opportunities to slip environmentally damaging proposals past legislative hurdles was provided by political turmoil before and after the recent impeachment proceedings that removed President Dilma Rousseff (see here, here, and here).

New Threats

The power of the ruralists has continued to grow even beyond its previous height, and new threats are surfacing right and left.

A proposed constitutional amendment (PEC-65/2012) that would effectively eliminate environmental licensing continues to progress to a Senate vote under “urgent” status. This would make the mere submission of an environmental impact study an automatic authorization for constructing any major infrastructure project, making any analysis by Brazil's environmental agency (IBAMA) merely token.

Proposed bills in the Senate (PLS-654/2015) and Chamber of Deputies (PL-3,729/2004) also are proceeding under “urgent” status. These would abbreviate the process of licensing and set an impossible deadline for IBAMA to approve any license, after which the proposed project would be automatically authorized.

Backroom Tactics

A dramatic example of the surprising nature of such proposals occurred in September 2016, when a sweeping bill for a "Program for Partnerships for Investment" (PPI) suddenly appeared (Law 13.334/2016) and was approved by the National Congress and then sanctioned by the new Brazilian President, Michael Temer, the next day.

Debate in the Senate plenary was limited to three opposition speakers -- but was a meaningless farce because under “urgent” status the party positions had been set and nothing said could change the votes.

This new law gives the PPI Executive Board power to override both IBAMA and Brazil's national agency for indigenous peoples (FUNAI), as well as all state and municipal agencies. With this unprecedented new law already approved, we can only wait in trepidation to see how the PPI progresses.

It doesn't stop there. In December a series of proposals suddenly appeared to authorize three industrial waterways, including one on the Tapajós and Teles Pires Rivers in southeastern Amazonia, that would involve flooding Munduruku indigenous land. The key Senate committee vote on these proposals has been delayed until the Senate reconvenes next month.

Scary Implications

The waterway proposal, as well as the various proposals to gut environmental licensing, would have permanent and irreparable impacts in Brazil.

They also relate to a proposed series of dams on the Tapajós River and its tributaries in Amazonia, including the São Luiz do Tapajós Dam that would partially flood the proposed Sawré Muybu indigenous land. The ruralist block is attempting to block the indigenous land proposal, which was made by former President Rousseff.

Pressure to build this Amazon mega-dam is very strong, with support coming from big building contractors, energy interests, and the agribusiness sector, including the current Minister of Agriculture, Blairo Maggi. Maggi is the largest producer of soybeans in Brazil, and his massive soy exports would be benefited by the dam and one of its associated waterways.

These are frightening times in Brazil. With the economy in recession, conservative political forces are aligning to scrap critical environmental and social safeguards that could expose Brazil and much of the Amazon to truly serious perils.

Environmental journalist Jeremy Hance, a regular contributor to ALERT, shares his perspectives on new research with big implications for Earth's biological diversity.

Here’s a morbid question you’ve probably never been asked: Would you rather die from extreme heat or cold?

Conservationists are now facing a somewhat similar quandary. Given the multitude of threats killing off species, conservationists must ask: Are more species dying from the age-old impacts on wildlife -- habitat disruption and human overexploitation -- or global warming?

Big Drivers of Change

A new study in Nature provides an answer, at least for the time being. It’s still overexploitation and land-use change.

Examining threats to nearly 8,700 threatened or near-threatened species in the IUCN Red List, the researchers found that that the most important threat was crop farming, which threatened 54 percent of the species studied, followed by logging, which threatened 46 percent.

In contrast, climate-change impacts -- which included extreme weather and heat waves ­-- threatened only 19 percent of the species. That’s around the same percentage as those threatened by overhunting. Raising livestock actually threatens more species -- 26 percent -- than either of these threats.

The researchers, led by Sean Maxwell at the University of Queensland, warn that growing concerns about climate change should not dampen efforts to combat more traditional threats. Indeed, overall, the study found that 72 percent of surveyed species are threatened by human activities linked to commerce, subsistence, or recreation.

The research is backed up by previous studies. For example a study in Nature in 2012 led by ALERT director Bill Laurance found that deforestation, logging, fires, and hunting were the biggest threats to species both inside and outside of tropical forest protected areas. Pollution and climate change proved less important, at least over the past 2-3 decades, which was the interval over which the study was conducted.

Climate Change Still Important

This doesn’t mean conservationists can afford to be blasé about climate change.

For example, recent research estimates that if temperatures are allowed to rise two degrees above Celsius -- the nominal target of the Paris Climate Agreement -- we could lose 5.2 percent of all species on the planet.

That’s hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, of species wiped out by climate change.

Moreover, a number of ecosystems -- from coral reefs and cloud forests to Arctic sea ice and low-lying islands -- are already proving particularly vulnerable to climate-change impacts.

In the recent study, Maxwell and colleagues noted that their findings might be hampered by the limitations of IUCN data. For example, these data full of taxonomic holes. While the IUCN has evaluated all known species of mammals, birds, and amphibians, other major groups have been left out, especially less charismatic assemblages such as fungi.

Moreover, it is likely that climate change impacts will only worsen with each passing year. At some point down the road, climate change may overwhelm other threats.

Furthermore, many of the IUCN’s evaluations are several years or even decades old. This lag-time means that current climate impacts may be underestimated for some species on the list.

Scary Synergisms

In the end, though, probably the most important thing to emphasize is that most species aren’t facing just one threat.

Maxwell’s study found that a stunning 80 percent of the species surveyed are under siege by more than one peril. Hence, most species aren’t battling for survival against just overharvesting or agricultural expansion or infrastructure or climate change -- but an increasingly lethal combination of two or more dangers at once.

A good analogy comes from boxing. If humans were in a boxing match with nature, we're not just giving nature an occasion jab -- but a flurry of punches arriving all at once. It's this combination of interacting threats that can be so devastating for the survival of species.

For example, a 2008 paper in Ambio led by Mark Cochrane of South Dakota State University found that the synergism of logging, fire, and climate change could radically damage the Amazon.

By elevating temperatures and worsening droughts, climate change makes the Amazon more prone to burning. Meanwhile, logging and habitat fragmentation make the tropical forest more likely to ignite and burn. And burning in the Amazon, of course, releases large amounts of carbon dioxide, leading to greater global warming.

Together these three threats may prove far more lethal to the world’s greatest rainforest than if they acted independently.

Going Forward

Maxwell’s study urges conservationists not to ignore the 'old' threats of habitat loss, degradation, and species overexploitation.

These old threats, the authors argue, also have old solutions: More protected areas, better regulations and enforcement for hunting and harvesting, reducing the use of pesticides and fertilizers, public education, and reducing food waste, among others.

Finally, the authors argue that by combating the old perils, conservationists will buy species more time in an age of rapid climate change. Tackling the pressing threats of habitat disruption and overharvesting today will reduce the chances of lethal synergisms tomorrow.